The Rise of the Traffic Light

There are multiple contenders when it comes to the question of who invented the traffic light. This episode looks at a few of the moments in traffic light history that got us to where we are today, as well as what made them a necessity in the first place. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So, Tracy,
traffic lights are part of everyday life. I mean, I
grew up in a place that had none that now

(00:23):
has a blinker light. But still, I grew up in
a place that are where the area we lived did
not have any, and now it has dozens. Um. It
grew very quickly, but they're pretty common at this point,
and both pedestrians and drivers tend to count on them,
particularly in cities. And recently, as I was sitting in
my car at a stop late late at night, I

(00:45):
was on my way home from the year, and the
light refused to turn. Uh, So I eventually had to
make a right turn instead of the left turn I
was trying to make, and then you turned so that
I could get through that intersection without breaking laws. And
it got me to wondering who invented traffic lights? Also
because it was late at night. My brain works that
way when I'm me Andrey uh. And it turns out

(01:06):
that if you google that question, you get a whole
lot of different answers. So I thought it might be
fun to look at a few of the moments in
traffic light history that got us where we are today
and talk about some of those various contenders to the
who did it first question. But before we get into
the traffic lights origins, we're going to cover a little
bit of what made traffic lights and necessity in the
first place. That, of course was cars, and cars have

(01:30):
a whole history all on their own because of like
a lot of other inventions, a whole lot of different
inventions had to happen to get to the point where
there was a vehicle they could actually carry a driver
and get somewhere. It wasn't as though one person was
kind of toiling away with the idea and then a
car popped out of their workshop fully formed. And this

(01:51):
is an issue that comes with some debate about who
should get credit for what, similar to the development of
the airplane. So we're not here to tease out that
nicular debate today. We're going to focus on the debate
of traffic lights. But it is worth noting some of
the inventions along the way. So Nicola Joseph Kunio, for example,
built a steam powered tractor for the French military in

(02:12):
seventeen sixty nine, and that could reach the blistering speed
of about two point five miles per hour. And an
electric carriage was being worked on in Scotland by a
man named Robert Anderson as really as the eighteen thirties.
But it's Carl Friedrich Benz who usually gets the credit
for inventing the first vehicle that someone might actually call
a car or automobile in terms of how we think

(02:34):
of it today. In the mid eighteen eighties, he came
up with a design for a gasoline vehicle powered by
an internal combustion engine. This car had three wheels, and
he patented it in his home country of Germany. In
eighteen seventy six, George Baldwin Selden, a US inventor, started
designing a vehicle with an internal combustion engine. Also, he
never built one of his cars, which was designed with

(02:57):
four wheels, but he did get a patent for it,
and then he licensed that patent to other manufacturers. In
eight six, Gottlieb Wilhelm Daimler improved on previous efforts with
his auto called a Constant Daimler, which featured four wheels,
and a four stroke internal combustion engine. In Einee, Brothers
Charles and Edgar Dryer became the first US auto manufacturers

(03:21):
with their car, which had a four horsepower two stroke motor.
Things really got moving at the dawn of the twentieth century.
In nineteen o one, Diamler's company produced a Mercedes that
jumped the industry forward. It could go as fast as
fifty three miles per hour and it had a thirty
five horsepower engine. Not everyone was keeping pace with the
level of engineering that was coming out of Germany, but

(03:43):
the Mercedes was not something everyone could afford or have
access to. About the same time, Ransom eat Old's introduced
a much cheaper vehicle in the United States that was
far less powerful, and we had three horsepower. Who was
steered with a tiller? Yeah, I like to think of
the things happening can currently like this goes fifty three

(04:04):
miles per hour. It's super fast and pretty amazing. I
got a tiller, but it was It worked in the
United States. The rise of the automobile's popularity is credited,
of course, to Henry Ford. It was Ford who managed
to keep up with the latest innovation and make cars
more accessible to a wider range of incomes. For example,
that Tiller situation was very affordable but not really technologically advanced,

(04:27):
and Ford kind of married these two concepts. By nineteen
o six, Ford Motor Company was turning out one hundred
cars a day from its production line. The fifteen horsepower
Ford Model N, which was in production from nineteen o
six to nineteen o seven, sold for six hundred dollars,
and its success was what led to the development of
the Model T, which debuted in its earliest incarnation in

(04:49):
October of nineteen o eight with a twenty horsepower engine,
and it cost eight hundred twenty five dollars. From that point,
Ford continued to refine the Model T for the next
nineteen years, with subsequent editions of the car coming in
at lower and lower price points, falling all the way
down to less than three hundred dollars in nine seven. So, naturally,
with more and more people able to afford motor cars,

(05:12):
roads got busier and busier, and that led to the
rather predictable problems of traffic and accidents. It's estimated that
by nineteen thirteen, there were two million drivers in the
US and one point two million vehicles on the road.
At this point, the rules of the road were pretty nebulous.
In more rural areas, while roads were less established, there
were also not all that many drivers, but in cities,

(05:34):
population density also meant traffic density. Also, in nineteen thirteen,
New York City was said to have gotten to the
point where it had two traffic jams each day at
peak hours. Chicago was experiencing slow down of its city
trolley service because the main thoroughfares became jammed, making it
difficult to maintain a regular schedule. By nineteen sixteen, San

(05:56):
Francisco had twenty six thousand cars on the streets, as
well as ten thousand horse buggies. So there's also that uh,
multiple different kinds of vehicles taking up the road problem,
and there was often talk in major cities that traffic
made automobiles slower than horse carts. Uh. Some people abandoned
cars pretty early on for this very reason they thought
it was not in fact an advancement. Press around the

(06:18):
globe featured stories debating the merits of cars and whether
they really represented a step forward or backward. And while
early cars were developed in Europe, especially France and Germany,
the costs remained high enough there that the increase in
motor traffic didn't pace as quickly as it did in
the United States. Europe didn't really start to have traffic
issues until the mid nineteen twenties. So you have probably

(06:41):
seen photographs of city streets from this era where there
are street cars, pedestrians, horse drawn carriages, and cars all
on the road at the same time. It almost always
looks pretty chaotic. Uh. That is because it was. Even
though larger cities sometimes stationed police at busy intersects to
try to manage things, that was not a super effective

(07:03):
way to do it, since there also wasn't always a
really clear set of rules or signals that all of
those motorists, pedestrians, etcetera. Would all recognize, and it tended
to be a lot of honking cars and whistle blowing
and everyone still kind of doing what they wanted and
hopefully getting out of the way. The National Safety Council
started tracking automobile related deaths in nineteen thirteen, and that

(07:23):
year four thousand, two hundred people died in an accident
in Cleveland kind of brought this problem into a sharp focus.
There was a March dinner party that had ended and
George Harbor, who was an oil magnet, was driving home
and when he turned onto the city's busy Euclid Avenue,
his car was hit by a street car and there
were no fatalities in this particular case, although that was

(07:46):
considered rather miraculous and it did make the papers and
kind of started a bigger discussion about it. Even before
traffic accidents got to be a big issue. Enterprising problem
solvers were on the case and depending on how you
define a traffic light, there are a few contenders for
the title of first. We'll talk about all those different
firsts after we take a quick sponsor break. So before

(08:14):
the break we mentioned lots of different efforts at controlling traffic,
and that means first we're going to talk about a
man named John Peak Knight. He was born in Nottingham, England,
in eight and from the time he was just a
child he really loved trains. He left school at the
age of twelve so that he could work at the
Midland Railway Company. Although that was a job that was
in the mail room. It wasn't working directly with trains,

(08:36):
but just the same it started his railway career and
he continued to work for railway companies as he moved
up the industry ladder. He's sort of that classic like
I started in the mail room and eventually I started
running things um and he was really good in terms
of having an eye for solving problems. For example, the BBC,
in an article about him, credited him as the inventor

(08:57):
of emergency brake chords in trains. In eighteen sixty five,
when he was in his late thirties, Night had an idea.
He had already been designing signaling systems for trains and
couldn't that same system be adapted for use on the
roads again. In eighteen sixty five, you'll recall from the
top of the show that while there were some attempts
that motorized vehicles that had been made before this time,

(09:18):
there really weren't cars as we think of them in existence,
but there were more and more horse drawn carriages. They
were turning into a traffic problem and more importantly a
safety issue for pedestrians. So Nights suggested to the Commissioner
of Metropolitan Police that he could adapt the semaphore system
used for trains to help with managing road traffic. So

(09:40):
his design featured arms that were held in specific positions
to signal whether it was safe to pass, and for
nighttime travelers, this system would switch over to using red
and green lights. Those were colors which were adapted from
railway usage, and the railways had adapted those from maritime signals.
Three years after having this idea night's design was installed
on December nine, eight sixty eight, near London's Westminster Bridge

(10:04):
and the intersection of Great George Street and Bridge Street.
A police officer had to operate the signals and to
educate the public, flyers were posted that explained how these
lights worked. They showed images of the semaphore arms lowered
at an angle which meant you could proceed but with caution,
and with the arms raised so that they were parallel
with the ground and that meant stop. And these flyers

(10:26):
also explained that the green and red lights would be
used at night. The copy on the flyers read police
Notice street crossing signals Bridge Street, New Palace Yard. By
the signal caution, all persons in charge of vehicles and
horses are warned to pass over the crossing with care
and do regard to the safety of foot passengers. The
signal stop will only be displayed when it is necessary

(10:49):
that vehicles and horses shall be actually stopped on each
side of the crossing to allow the passage of persons
on foot. Notice being this given to all persons in
charge of via coals and horses to stop clear of
the crossing. Richard Maine, Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police
and once installed, this traffic light had a pretty immediate

(11:09):
positive effect. People understood what it was about, they had
been educated, traffic was kind of under control. But unfortunately
it was a short lived project. In early eighteen sixty nine,
so just around a month after it had been installed,
during an evening shift, one of the gas lamps that
was used for the light based night signaling exploded due
to a faulty gas meme and the policeman that was

(11:32):
on duty was very badly burned and night system was
immediately abandoned and the United States, early efforts were made
in a number of cities to try to control traffic
before traffic signals came along, and they had variable success.
There was no one way to do it, so everybody
was trying their own thing. Some cities started using sign
systems that read things along the lines of stop or proceed.

(11:55):
These didn't light up, so they weren't as much help
at night, which was, unfortunately when were needed the most.
In nineteen twelve, a Salt Lake City, Utah policeman named
Lester Wire created his own traffic light. Wire was born
on September three, eight eight seven in Salt Lake, and
as a young man, he enrolled at the University of Utah,

(12:16):
but the financial strain of paying for school ended his
education early. He left college in nineteen ten, and at
that point he took a job on the city's police force.
In nineteen twelve, the Salt Lake City p D formed
a new division to deal with traffic, and Wire was
put in charge of that division. He had to figure
out a way to make order out of the growing
problem of having trolley's, pedestrian buggies, and cars all traveling

(12:39):
the same roadways. At first, he wrote regulations and rules
to manage the traffic. Those were Salt Lake Cities first
traffic laws, and he positioned a police officer at the
city's busiest intersection to direct the traffic. But he realized
pretty quickly that while it did help to have an
officer directing traffic, this approach did not seem terribly efficient,
and it was actually a pretty hard job for the

(13:01):
officers involved. They would have to keep that position manned
in all kinds of weather, and shifts were often really,
really long, and there was also just the inherent danger
of standing in traffic trying to enforce entirely new regulations.
These concerns lead Wire to start working on his traffic light.
His light is often described as looking like a bird house,
and that's apt, although in terms of its size it's

(13:24):
closer to a little fort area in a cat condo.
It had two round holes on each of its four
faces and was mounted on a tin foot pole. It
had red and green lights thanks to bulbs that Lester
Wire dipped into paint. This was attached to overhead trolley
wires and was manually operated by a police officer using switches.
So although it's still had to have a person operating

(13:46):
it in this roadside booth, it remained an improvement over
standing in the middle of the street to direct the
traffic wires. Invention inspired additional innovation, and it continued to
impact Salt Lake City as a frontrunner in traffic control.
In nineteen seventeen, Salt Lake City became the first city
in the United States with an interconnected traffic light system,
which was automated by the mid nineteen twenties. Wire did

(14:09):
not get rich off of this. He didn't patent his system.
He continued working on the police force and eventually became
a detective, which is what he did until he retired. Cleveland, though,
often gets the claim to fame for the first electric light,
and that was thanks to engineer James Hodge. Hodges design
included the words stop and go on light up signs
that sat on the four corners of an intersection, and

(14:32):
he had not yet received a patent on his traffic
light when he installed it, but it went up on
August five, nineteen fourteen, at the intersection of Euclid Avenue
and A hundred and fiftry. You'll recall that story about
the person in a bad accident took place on Euclid Avenue,
so that was part of why it was considered a
good candidate for something like this. Unlike today's lights, hodges

(14:52):
invention wasn't on a timer or automated in any way
to change. With an inductive loop embedded in the road,
his light also had human operator. A policeman was stationed
in a booth on the side of the intersection. He
manually changed the lights or red to green with a switch.
The system was designed to prevent any accidental conflicts and
the signals, which some other systems had encountered, which is

(15:15):
also sometimes a problem on trains, which is one of
the earlier inspirations for these ideas. Yeah, this one like
automatically you would have to cut off a signal from
one side to have the other one lit, so that
it fixed that little problem. Additionally, the Cleveland system had
a function that could trigger all of the lights to
go red at once. It was basically like one master

(15:37):
switch that the policeman on duty could flip and that
would allow emergency vehicles to pass without obstruction, which is
kind of a cool design. Additional safety elements were included
in the controller's booth. It actually had a telephone, and
it had two telegraph lines directly to the police and
the fire department. Hodge applied for a patent for his design.
The Municipal Traffic Control System received that pattern in nineteen eighteen,

(16:02):
but before that patent was issued, the first automated system
had been installed in San Francisco, and there are more
innovators to talk about in the traffic lights origin story.
But before we get to all those, we're going to
hear from one of the sponsors that keep stuff you
missed in history class going. So while Hodge was awaiting

(16:26):
his patent, another innovation was also developing in nineteen seventeen,
this time in Detroit, Michigan. William Potts was a Detroit
policeman born in eighteen eighties three who saw the need
for additional information for motorists in this whole UH traffic
light plan. He thought maybe they should warn them about
an impending red light. So it was Potts who added
the yellow light to the traffic light equation that was

(16:49):
first put into use in nineteen twenty. He also innovated
by developing the first four direction light. Garrett Morgan was
another man who saw the need for a transitional warning
in between driving and stopping. Morgan was born on March fourth,
eighteen seventy seven, in Paris, Kentucky. He was the son
of a formerly enslaved man as his father Sydney Morgan,
and his mother was Elizabeth Reid, who was of Native

(17:12):
American and African descent, and Morgan left school to work
full time in his early teens. He was incredibly clever
when it came to figuring out how machines worked and
just being able to see a problem and solve it.
And actually he was also really interested in continuing his
education because when he started to earn money from his
first job, which was a handyman, he was working for

(17:32):
a fairly wealthy employer, he used that money to hire
a tutor so he could continue to get educated. He
worked in the sewing machine industry, repairing and refining machine design,
developed a chemical relaxer for hair, and also created an
early gas mask. In nine Thanks once again to his ingenuity,
he became part of the history of traffic lights. Morgan's

(17:53):
decision to work on the traffic problem allegedly came from
having witnessed an accident in an intersection, and he was
also a risk. He was the first black man in Cleveland,
where he was living at the time, to own a car,
and he saw that cars that suddenly saw a stop
signal weren't always able to break in a timely manner
before they got into the middle of the intersection. So

(18:14):
he was like, we should tell them the red lights coming.
So Morgan's design was a T shape with arms that
transitioned from straight up to down at an angle, with
positions for the arms that designated different messages. Morgan was
savvy in business and patented his invention not only in
the US but also in Canada and Britain, and then
sold the patent to General Electric for forty dollars. Morgan

(18:37):
has a pretty fantastic life story, so he might get
an episode all his own at some point. Yeah, there's
a whole story about him, unrelated to any of this
traffic business, really doing some heroic things and never getting
credit because he was a black man until much later
in the game. He also, just like I said, was
mind blowing lee smart, which always fascinates me. Automatic timers,
developed in World War One helped move traffic light technology forward.

(19:00):
Once the war was over, and while some efforts had
been made in automatic lights that required no policemen to
manually flip switches, in the nineteen twenties, the technology rapidly
became the rule rather than the exception. There were almost
one hundred automatic lights in New York by ninety six,
and that freed up literally thousands of police personnel that
had been standing in intersections to work on other vital rules.

(19:24):
I think I saw a statistic that of like three
thousand officers who routinely were positioned at traffic intersections, they
were able to drop that back to five hundred that
routinely kept doing it. By n most US cities and
towns had installed some sort of stop light system, and
to some degree they became emblems of progress and madernity,
while towns without them came to be regarded with a

(19:45):
measure of disdain. I would say that's still the case
for a lot of folks who grew up in places
that don't have them just because they're too small. Ye.
The pejorative use of the phrase one horse town came
to suggest the insignificant place, uh, and that shifted over
time to the one stoplight town, although both continue to
be used. I feel like I hear one worst town

(20:07):
more often, just personally, I use one one stop light
town more often, possibly because I grew up in one
and was like, which is terrible. Don't talk that way
about anybody's town. Other people live there and love it.
Maybe that's because I grew up in a place that
had more horses than stoplights, which again was zero. Maybe uh.

(20:27):
International adoption of traffic lights was a little slower, but
in Paris installed its first traffic light. At that point
it was only red, so it was like you could
either go or the red would light up in that
meant stop. It didn't have the intermittent different messaging or
like proceed with caution. Berlin joined in with traffic light
installation in n It was almost before London really embraced

(20:50):
street lights. There had been a few that popped up
here and there, but the invention of the electric traffic
signal offered a safer alternative to the gas light system
that admit its catastrophic end in the eighteen sixties, so
they were a little more willing to adopt them again.
And once the US had started to achieve a level
of uniformity and its stop lights across the country, which
happened kind of organically in some ways because people were

(21:13):
noticing other each other's designs and kind of all working
on improving everything together, and once they kind of started
to get pretty uniform, other countries would just adopt the
US models. Yeah, it's like if you haven't traveled a
ton in the US, it's like the traffic lights aren't
really identical from one state to another, but they're they're
similar enough that you can make sense of them. Yeah,

(21:36):
you always know, like you're going to see the lights
stacked pretty much in the same order. If it's a
vertical stop lights. Some are are horizontally laid out. But yeah,
you're you're not gonna like suddenly drive into another state
and be like, WHOA, I don't know what any of
these signals mean. They're pretty uniform as long as you
are not color blind, which which it is. The color
combination that's not great in terms of color blindness us.

(22:00):
With the introduction of any new technology, though, there was
backlash to all these new lights. Detractors felt if a
mechanism on the road managed the flow of traffic, people
would stop paying attention to each other. They're also concerned
that this would lead to social isolation for motorists, and
even more concerning, that lack of connection would lead people
to treat each other with more impatience and less respect.

(22:24):
It's like these folks who were probably labeled as alarmists
at the time, we're pretty apprecient. Nobody had coined the
term road rage at that point. To combat these concerns,
some auto clubs in the nineteen, teams started sponsoring courtesy weeks,
where motorists were urged to treat other drivers as well
as pedestrians with extra respect. I sort of love that, Um,

(22:47):
let's have a week where we're extra extra nice. I
think we should have courtesy weeks for everything. But as
as a pedestrian, the overwhelming amount of the time, I agree, Yeah,
I mean, and some of that too, I feel like,
is just because like if you grow up like in
a place, or if you live in a place where
there isn't much pedestrian traffic and then you move to

(23:08):
somewhere where there is, Like there have been times because
growing up we didn't have a lot of pedestrian traffic
in my town where I drew all the time, and
then when I was suddenly driving in a city, I
was like, whoa, I gotta watch for people. Uh. It's
easy to not have flexed that muscle and have to
learn it at slightly slower ramp. Yeah, that's also true
with with bikes. If you've never driven a place that
had brought of bike traffic and bike lanes, it's a

(23:32):
totally different awareness. Like the amount of time it takes
a bike to get to you versus the amount of
time it takes a pedestrian to get to you or
just totally different. Uh. Yeah. And there was another big
concern in the midst of all of these traffic lights
being adopted, particularly as they became automated, was that if
there was not a police officer present, people felt that

(23:53):
most motorists would just disregard the lights anyway. That isn't
entirely off base. Of course, in the modern era, there
have been cameras installed on a lot of stop lights.
They're not everywhere, but certainly there are many uh to
combat this problem because that was a legitimate concern. People
will look around and run a light if there's not
a policeman present. Sometimes. Incidentally, if you ever played that

(24:16):
game red Light, Green Light when you're a kid, you
can thank Cleveland's education system. Maybe. The Smithsonian article from
eighteen mentions that a school teacher in Cleveland came up
with the game in nineteen nineteen to help children learn
and understand the new rules of the road as governed
by traffic lights. But in a two thousand eight obituary,
The l A Times credited children's TV host Bill Stula

(24:38):
with inventing the game. Is a way to get kids
to drink milk in the early nineteen fifties, so totally
different purpose. They are also variations of this game played
around the world. Yeah, that I feel like we don't
really know for sure what the origins of green light are,
but I thought it was worth a mention. Um, So
you may be wondering what was the net benefit of
the establishment of stop lights and other safety measure years,

(25:00):
and if you look strictly at the number of fatalities,
it might seem like things got worse instead of better.
We mentioned earlier, for example, that people died as a
result of car crashes in nineteen thirteen in the US
and in twenty seventeen the number was forty thousand, two
hundred thirty one. But if you actually break it down
in terms of numbers of fatalities, as that's related to

(25:20):
the numbers of vehicles on the road, that situation changes
in a hurry. In nineteen thirteen, thirty three point three
eight people died for every ten thousand vehicles on the road.
At death rate in seventeen was one point four seven
per ten thousand vehicles. Yeah, you have to adjust for
a population density there. You can't just go with flat numbers. Um.

(25:42):
Things did not immediately get better, though, they kind of
got better, and then they got a little bit worse.
It took time for various cities and towns to start
adopting traffic lights into their roadways, and even longer, as
we said, for there to be uniformity across those and
other municipalities. Things reached their absolutely worst in terms of
death statistics on roadways in nine seven, but from that

(26:04):
year they have fallen pretty consistently. Yeah, and maybe a
less concretely quantifiable since there's also been a lot of
discussion lately about cities being built in a way that
prioritizes cars and what that means for everything from pollution
to pedestrians being able to get anywhere and whatnot. And
you could definitely look at that traffic lights and how

(26:27):
they were implemented as a piece of all of that. Yeah,
and it is interesting, right, I mean, traffic lights were
not the only thing going on. People were like, hey,
we should have some signs and stuff like what if
there were belts? Yeah, there were. There were some parallel
developments going on in different avenues of of the traffic
safety roadmap to really mix some metaphors up all crazy. Yeah,

(26:49):
but traffic lights are one of those things. And I'm,
like I said, sort of fascinated when you think about it. Right,
when I think about um, Daimler or Bins or Henry Word,
I wonder if they could ever comprehend like the photos
that you see of like a modern city at rush
hour and like what happened. Um. It's an interesting thing.

(27:11):
I know there are a lot of cities that are
also kind of pushing to remove as many cars from
the road as possible, just in the interest of pollution
and and safety. And I'll be fascinated to see what
happens in the next fifty years because cars are also evolving.
I have listener mail has nothing to do with cars.
It does have things to do with my man, Thomas Harriet, um,

(27:36):
who did things both good and bad. But this is
from our listener Carl, who writes high big big fan.
And so it was really cool when you said the
name of my hometown and the Thomas Harriet episode. I
grew up and went to college in Durham, England. There
is even a portrait of Harriet in the university. If
you ever get the chance to come visit, please do.
The whole town is like a living piece of history
because the university bought a lot of the abandoned historic

(27:59):
houses and buildings and uses them now as lecture halls.
Not only that, but some of the oldest buildings in
town we're always used by the college and its students.
When I was studying, we had our meals in the castle,
graduated in the cathedral, and had lectures in a Victorian
erast school. It was always weird to be dead tired
eating cereal at five am before classes started, looking up
and seeing portraits from the sixteen hundreds. That sounds mind

(28:22):
blowingly cool. I just think the town itself really captures
the vibe of your show of history being fun and
every day and all around, as well as being a
beautiful place to visit. If this hasn't convinced you, there's
a postcard winging its way to you, guys as we
type speak regards Carl. That is so charming and such
a lovely way. I feel like for uh A university

(28:44):
to keep history alive forever. I think that sounds utterly spectacular.
So thank you so much Carl for writing us. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
You can also find us everywhere on social media as
Missed in History. Missed in History dot com is also
the website where you can find us that includes all
of our previous episodes uh and show notes on any

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of the episodes that Tracy and I have worked on.
And if you would like to subscribe to the podcast,
we would like you to subscribe to the podcast. You
can do that at Apple Podcasts, on the I Heart
Radio app, or wherever it is that you listen Stuffy.
Missed in History Class is a production of I heart
Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,

(29:29):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.